


Bring Down the Sun

by soulshrapnel



Category: Star Wars: Darth Vader (Comics)
Genre: Eriaduan mythology, Hunting, In-Universe Mythology, Just bros being bros, Multi, Pre-Relationship, Space Fascist Disaster Boys, chandar's folly, most dangerous game, noncon/dubcon overtones, primal kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:47:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29065314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulshrapnel/pseuds/soulshrapnel
Summary: In Eriaduan mythology, the moon hunts the sun, chasing her through the sky with a hungry and indefatigable love.Darth Vader wants Wilhuff Tarkin, born and bred on Eriadu, to hunt him.The sun might have almost been easier.
Relationships: Original Mythological Figure/Original Mythological Figure, Wilhuff Tarkin/Darth Vader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	Bring Down the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> This sprang up out of a conversation on a Vadarkin Discord server - I owe many of its ideas to [taxxxon](https://taxxxon.tumblr.com/) and [carrionspiked.](https://carrionspiked.tumblr.com/)
> 
> If you haven't read Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith #18 (2017), a.k.a. "Bad Ground," a.k.a. _the comic where Tarkin hunts Vader for sport, oh my god I cannot BELIEVE they got that past the Disney censors_ , then this may not make a whole lot of sense to you. It retells several scenes from that comic, canon-compliantly, but not necessarily in enough detail for a reader who's not already familiar with how these dots connect.
> 
> A word on the **noncon/dubcon overtones** tag - the myth section of this story, like many Earth myths, is pretty iffy about consent. I'm Choosing Not To Warn both for that and for violence to humans and animals. The actual canon characters aren't nonconning each other, or indeed, having sexual contact at all.

Now the sun was the most glorious of beasts, her body blazing with light, her breath a heat that warmed the whole world. Her limbs were strong and lithe, her gaze a brightness beyond all other brightness, her hair straight and shining as it pierced the clouds. She was strong enough to run for joy around the circumference of the world, rising each morning, falling each night only to run to the east below the world and begin again.

Naturally, the moon wanted her.

Javan was the biggest and brightest of the moons of the world, with sure hands at the bowstring, a clever mind, and swift feet; but even Javan could not run as fast as the sun. He chased in her footsteps, panting for her heat, but she was always far ahead of him, sometimes looking back to laugh, and even her laughter was flame. He came closer to her, and his face burned full and round with her reflected light; he fell further behind, and in despair he shrank to a sliver, a crescent like the bow he wielded, lean and hungry. But he could not catch her, not by running, and his arrows burned to ash in her hair.

"You cannot catch the sun," said the stars, looking down small and tranquil from their heavenly perches. The stars were men of reason, and they burned cold, without any need to run or mate or eat their fill.

But when the sun was high in the sky, her light banished theirs completely.

*

"Where shall I send you down?" Tarkin asks, looking out from the Star Destroyer's window onto the barren landscape of Chandar's Folly. All the preparations are in place. They've blocked out a large area for the hunt, and Tarkin's hired hunting party awaits him at the base camp. This is a difficult challenge, and Tarkin has set out its terms in a way that maximizes his own strengths; otherwise he'd have no chance at all. But it still seems only fair to give Vader a head start.

"Take your shuttle to your base camp," Vader instructs. "I will simultaneously take a shuttle of my own."

Tarkin nods. "Very good." This way, he will see that Vader _has_ landed, but the precise coordinates won't be immediately apparent. That is appropriate; a hunter rarely begins with the precise starting coordinates of his prey. Tracking and carefully seeking it out is half the fun.

He wonders if he should say more. When Vader asked for this, calling in a very large and strange favor, he technically didn't ask to be hunted; only to be challenged by some deliberate attempt on his life. He was indifferent about the specifics. Tarkin chose hunting as his method for very practical reasons. It puts him on his best footing and it strips many of Vader's usual military tactics away. But hunting has certain... implications in Tarkin's home culture. Eriadu's founders, a thousand years ago, were proud and self-reliant hunters, and that ethos of predation filtered into everything they did. Learning to hunt is how a traditional Eriaduan man comes of age. Hunting is used to describe life and death, passion and ambition and war and even love. But Vader is gruff and action-oriented, never liking to speak at length when a quick application of violence will do. He is not interested in culture and myth, except perhaps his own strange mythology of the Dark Side. Even if Tarkin finds the words to explain what this means to him, he does not think Vader would care.

Symbolism aside, this is the greatest quarry any real person from Eriadu has ever hunted. Tarkin feels something hungry creeping into his gaze as he gives Vader a last look. If everything goes according to plan, then in a few days' time, this gloriously monstrous form will be laid low and broken at his feet. Temporarily, he hopes, but the whole point of this deal is that either one of them could die.

To hold that mental image in his mind, to know that Vader _asked_ him to try to do this...

Well.

It's intoxicating.

*

"Catch me, then, if you can," said the sun. "But I will not make it easy." She was already fading again into the violet dusk, looking playfully back over her shoulder, and Javan could not run fast enough to follow.

But the sun brings life, and the moons bring death. Life is impatient, always surging forwards. Death is as patient as eternity.

So Javan followed slowly in the sun's foosteps, and he learned the paths she took through the heavens. He learned where she bent down to drink, with her long reflection shining gold in the sea. He learned where she lay down to sleep, in the secret paths under the earth. He learned where and when she stopped to feed, on the dew of early morning and the steam of the midday forest. He studied how and where she hid her droppings, and what the broken wisps of the clouds looked like after she had passed through.

He learned her until he understood the sun's movements as he understood his own face.

Finally the moment came when Javan felt he had learned enough. So he settled down to wait in a place by a silver stream, where he knew the sun would pass by to wash herself that morning. Instead of chasing in her wake, he waited where he knew she would approach him head-on. And when he felt her approaching, he let loose his hounds.

Now the smaller moons are Javan's hounds: Char, Ague, Riptide and Fang, each faster and more eager than their master. They raced to her as quick as the wind, slavering, snapping with their silvery jaws. One by one they leapt - Riptide at her heels, Char at her flank, Ague at her breast, Fang at her throat.

She turned to face them, and she smiled. And, one by one - in the blaze of her hair, in the heat of her gaze - each of the moons burst into howling, helpless flame.

*

For a second Tarkin thinks the flamethrower gambit might actually work. They've got Vader surrounded, they've got him engulfed in flames, there's even a flinch that looks like _fear_ in his posture, surely this will do it - 

Then Vader moves his hand slightly, and there is a strange click, and every single one of the flamethrowers explodes.

"Retreat!" Tarkin bellows. It's immediately too late for the four of them who were holding the flamethrowers; those are engulfed immediately, burning to cinders before Tarkin's eyes. It doesn't matter that he doesn't stop to stare; some images sear themselves into the brain in an instant, and he sees them even as he runs. He is familiar with the phenomenon.

But most of the party, including himself, were holding simpler slugthrowers, and these ones survive. Some of them howl as they flee, beating the flames out of their pant legs or their bushcraft gloves. Vader seems more intent on watching the first four die than on giving chase at any speed. Zigzagging through the barren lands, panting and sweating and terrified, most of them make it to their rendezvous point.

" _That_ didn't work," says Yerga, his second-in-command, wiping the panicked sweat from her brow.

Leaning on his slugthrower, Tarkin permits himself a private smile. These are good hunters, people he respects. They all signed up for this with open eyes, as hungry for the challenge as for the ample reward he offered. Tarkin has shared with them a number of plans, many possible points of attack that _could_ work with a quarry like Vader. He will try them all, time and circumstance permitting. But he has already calculated the most likely outcome. The more he watches Vader in the wild, the more certain Tarkin is that he will have to use the last of his plans, the one he has intentionally kept back from the rest of the group.

The one where, apart from himself, not a single one of them survives.

*

Even knowing the sun as he knew his own body, Javan could not catch her. She was stronger than him, and quicker, and more glorious, and she burned.

He pined away with hunger for her, his body narrowing to the crescent of his bow, then to a sliver. He became thin enough to slip through the smallest crack, yet he could not catch her.

"There is no shame in admitting defeat," said the stars, looking down at him from high above, but Javan never listened to the stars.

For the moon brings death, and even as the light of his face gave way to blackness and his strength failed, the master hunter had one more trick to try.

He lay down under the water, in just the spot where he knew that the sun would soon crouch to drink.

His face was so dark with need and longing that she did not see him under the small lapping waves. She bent down at the river's bank and cupped her burning hands to bring the water to her mouth, and the water's surface reflected her, shining and brilliant, back into her own eyes. Javan reflected nothing at all.

But when she bent down over him he lunged, his hand round her wrist like a vise, and pulled her under.

Her struggle boiled the water from the river, and her cries sent the birds fleeing into the sky, but Javan was a master hunter, and he held firm. His body covered hers, and the midday sky went dark; and her burning blood, in the river's dry bed, set the whole forest to flame.

*

Tarkin falls to his knees on the ashen ground of the stormlands, letting the rifle fall from his hand, feigning exhaustion.

It has to be only a hair's breadth from the truth. That's the trick to this. One can't arbitrarily play-act with Vader. To lure him in and give him any false sense of victory, Tarkin has to let himself be brought exactly this low, his whole hunting party slaughtered, his body protesting that it can't go much further, his lungs ragged with the effort of flight. The terror of violent death, the knowledge of Vader's superior strength and impending victory, has to be at the forefront of his mind so that Vader will read it there. It has to be _real._

He has calculated everything, right down to the number of steps he should run on this ground before collapsing - it has to be just the right number, adjusted up or down for weather, to give a sufficiently high probability of the lightning hitting a metal object Vader's size without killing Tarkin as well. If he has miscalculated even a little bit...

Vader's footsteps are unnaturally loud behind him. Tarkin's heart beats hard. Helpless terror sings in his veins.

It's a particular insanity of Tarkin's, he supposes, one that has come upon him in the heat of battle before. But he hopes that the lightning doesn't strike until the last moment. He hopes he feels Vader's breath on his neck, hears the lightsaber hum to life. He wants it to be that close. It will make the coming victory all the sweeter.

*

When it was over, Javan lay with his hand tangled in the sun's hair, unwilling to let go. The river around them had boiled to nothing, and the forests burned to ash, but Javan was the largest moon and stronger than any of these things, and his grip was firm. He meant to keep her. He wanted her radiant head as a trophy, her burning blood to heat his hearth, her hide to lie on.

But even as he thought these things, she turned as insubstantial as a sunbeam, and she slipped through his fingers, moving on again.

"No," said Javan, picking himself up to give chase. He was hale and whole again, and glowing with her bright reflection. For the sun brings life. "You cannot escape me; I caught you already. I had you already. I have slain you."

"You think that you have studied me so well," she said. "Did you forget that I am the sun? I rise again each morning."

"No," said Javan again, and he picked up his arrows, and he called for his hounds. Char, Ague, Riptide and Fang bounded after him, alive and unburnt, for the sun brings life. He wanted her too much; he could not give up the chase. Even knowing it was futile, and that she was the faster runner, he ran.

And he is chasing her still.

*

Once he's crawled out of choking range, Tarkin takes a long look back at Vader. His singed armor is giving off a worrying ozone smell, and his respirator sounds like it's about to give up the ghost, but it _is_ still making its sound, and the _Carrion Spike_ with a fully prepped repair bay is already en route, and that's what's important. Vader will live. Tarkin is still alive, and that's important too.

Vader doesn't seem pleased with this outcome, which puts a slight, annoyed damper on Tarkin's mood. He worked very hard and took a number of risks to make this happen; he supposes he'd like some word of acknowledgement. But that isn't Vader's way, especially since he must be in a staggering amount of pain, and he's such a glorious creature, lying there broken, the sheer power of him somehow more evident than ever. There's a reason why Tarkin had to crawl this far away.

It's not fair to expect Vader to know what this means to him. Vader is the one who asked for it, and Vader has no idea the rich symbolism of hunting in Tarkin's home culture. If an Eriaduan were to ask Tarkin to hunt them, Tarkin would have asked a much larger range of questions about their intent, about what sort of bond they believed they were formalizing and what spoils exactly would go to the victor. Vader clearly isn't thinking of any of that; he's from some little desert rock of a world, he's a Sith, he cares nothing for Eriadu or Chandar's Folly. To project anything Eriaduan on to him is vanity.

But he can't help but think of it as he contemplates Vader, the most dangerous and impressive thing Tarkin has ever brought down, like a creature taken straight from a myth.

In Tarkin's eyes, for that one moment, the dark form of him blazes with light.

**Author's Note:**

> Carrionspiked helped me brainstorm names for the moons; "Javan" is meant to come from vaguely the same root as "Jova."
> 
> (If you read "the moon brings death" and immediately went "that's no moon!!" then yes, lol, that was intentional.)
> 
> Also, yes, there is a Vadarkin Discord server now; it's about time this little ship got big enough for a Discord of its own. :-) If that's of interest to you, ping me for an invite. I'm [madeofsplinters](https://madeofsplinters.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


End file.
